31 March 2006

Ashikaga was once an important center for Japanese textile manufacturing, dating back to the days of silkworm-raising. In the early days of Japan's industrial revolution, there were waterwheels (水車 mizuguruma) all over this piedmont town. Nowadays, the textile industry has left town, leaving behind a legacy of handicraft artisans, fine textile shops, and a few working pieces of machinery in a "play-learn" emporium (遊学館 yuugakkan), where you can learn how to weave a coaster on a small floor loom. (It costs ¥400 and usually takes 30-45 minutes.) Last week, while my visiting in-laws were trying their hands at weaving, I stood around translating, looking up words in my electronic dictionary, and listening to the two old timers who were demonstrating a braiding machine and a spinning machine that was plying thread from bobbins onto reels (clockwise on one side, counterclockwise on the other). They were excited to have an interested audience for a change.

One of the best things about doing fieldwork in a second language is that you often learn new things in the process, and also get a better command of vocabulary in your primary language. I learned a lot of English fish names a couple of decades ago when I elicited the local names for several hundred fish in a coastal language of New Guinea. Here are a few items of useful vocabulary from my 遊学館 experience.

機 hata, loom - The Chinese character with which Japanese hata is written also indicates all manner of new-fangled machinery, such as 洗濯機 sentakki 'washing machine', 飛行機 hikouki 'flying machine (= airplane)', and the Japanese 'machine man' superhero Kikaida. So now 'loom' can also be rendered as 織機 shokki 'weaving machine', and 'power loom' as 機械機 kikaibata (lit. 'machine loom'). Worse yet, the same character also occurs in the famous Sinitic compound meaning 'crisis': 危機 kiki, danger + something not quite equal to opportunity—more like 'wit, resource, device'.

杼 hi, shuttle - In sharp contrast to 機 'loom', the character for 'shuttle' is rare enough that my electronic dictionary ranks it last among the ten kanji pronounced hi and Microsoft's Japanese-language input system doesn't even offer it among its 42 ways to write the syllable hi. I had to go copy the character from unicode.org. In any case, most Japanese are quite familiar with the word adapted from English: シャトル shatoru, as in shatoru basu and supeesu shatoru.

The newly elected Chilean government is the most Jewish government in the world, with three Jewish ministers and one deputy minister serving in the cabinet, Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported Tuesday.

UPDATE: I excerpted the first paragraph of the story, but should have quoted the headline and subhead, which follow.

Most Jewish gov’t outside Israel – in ChileFollowing the Israeli government, the newly elected Chilean cabinet is the most Jewish government in the world, with three Jewish ministers, one deputy minister serving in governmentItamar Eichner

David MacDuff of A Step at a Time has translated an interesting article on Russian myths about recent developments in Ukraine and Belarus. Here's the lead-in.

“The Russian ruling class and its entourage of experts, attempting to react to the events in Ukraine and in Belarus, have created a number of absorbing cliches which may possibly have a reassuring effect on them, and perhaps bolster up their self-confidence, but which in reality cause doubts about the adequacy of their ideas about the world. I will list the most popular arguments to which our ruling elite resorts, interpreting the development of the two states mentioned above," writes political analyst Lilia Shevtsova in Vedomosti, RF.

29 March 2006

The negative consequence of the first Arakan campaign [on Burma's border with Assam] was further to envenom relations between the Arakanese Buddhists and the local Muslim population. Zainuddin, a Muslim civil officer posted to the areas which the British temporarily reconquered in Arakan, wrote a confidential account of the hostility between the communities. The British Baluch troops in the area treated the local Buddhist population very badly, he recorded, telling them that the Muslims who had suffered at their hands during the Japanese invasion of the previous year 'would take full revenge on the Arakanese "Mugs"'. The coolies and other camp followers who flooded into the region in the wake of the British stole large numbers of local boats and brutalized the people. Zainuddin compared the British treatment of the civilian population very unfavourably with that of the Japanese. Indeed, [Viceroy of India] Wavell himself was worried by rumours that British troops had shot out of hand village headmen in Japanese-occupied areas. All in all, these events seem to reverse the usual stereotypes of Japanese brutality and British solicitude for the civilian population. They were also part of a pattern common to the whole crescent [of British colonies in Southeast Asia]: inter-community conflict became endemic in the wake of the fighting and would persist for at least a generation. Finally, Zainuddin delivered his most savage observation. On the appearance of the Japanese the indifferent and lethargic British troops 'began to run as no deer had ever run when chased by a tiger'.

Singapore city was placed under the Kempeitai, the military police, who moved into a Japanese hotel, the Toyo on Queen Street, and set up road blocks. These checkpoints were volatile places. The soldiers manning them reacted violently to the confusion and resistance that ensued when people began to move around again in search of family and food. But people had learned from tales of the China campaign that a sentry was a 'mighty lord', and that to bow to him was to show the respect due to the Emperor himself. This offended the Muslims: to them, it was 'as if we pray'.

Malaya had been bombarded with the crude racial stereotypes of Japanese in British propaganda and in the cartoon art of the [overseas Chinese] National Salvation movement. People were unprepared for the tough, bearded men they encountered in the first wave of the occupation; they were noxious too from two months in the field. They were not prepared either, despite the grim predictions, for the full savagery of their arrival. The hospitals were the first target. At Alexandra Hospital in Singapore, after the bitter fighting nearby on the western outskirts of the city, a terrible retribution was taken. The doctors who met the Japanese at the hospital entrance were slaughtered and many patients were bayoneted in their beds. Around 400 others were crowded into an outhouse overnight, later to be killed. The Asian doctors on duty were aghast as they watched the soldiers smashing the X-ray machinery. 'Why were they like lunatics, their eyes, just like lunatics?'

28 March 2006

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,We shall have what to do after firing. But today,Today we have naming of parts. JaponicaGlistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens, And today we have naming of parts.

What particular plant did Henry Reed intend to refer to in this poem? (I remember reading it in an English lit class during my freshman year at the University of Richmond in the spring of 1968—before I dropped out of ROTC, and then out of college altogether, ending up in the Army anyway.) I'm guessing either camellia or Japanese quince, both of which bloom in the spring.

椿 tsubaki,Camellia japonica - The cherry blossoms are getting all the attention in the Kanto (Greater Tokyo) area these days as they reach their peak, but the light pink to dark crimson camellias have been in full flower for a few weeks already. A great variety of cultivars of Camellia japonica are all over the place, often in hedges.

木瓜 boke,Chaenomeles speciosa - Japanese quince is also known as Chaenomeles japonica. The normal Sino-Japanese reading for the name of the plant should be mokka (< moku 'tree' + ka 'melon'), the name owing something to its melonlike fruit. Another name for a flowering tree formed on the same pattern is 木蓮 or 木蘭mokuren (lit. 'tree lotus' or 'tree orchid'), Magnolia liliflora or lily magnolia. A slightly different variety of Magnolia, Magnolia kobus—from its Japanese name 辛夷kobushi—is in full, brilliant white bloom these days.

百日紅 sarusuberi (lit. 'monkey slide'), Lagerstroemina indica - The native Japanese name for crape myrtle describes its smooth (guavalike) trunk and stems, while the Chinese characters describe the flowers, but the two names bear no relation to each other beyond referring to the same plant. You can pronounce the name of the plant according to the characters as hyakunichikou (lit. 'hundred day red'), but I'm not sure how many Japanese speakers would recognize it by that name on first hearing it. (I would have spelled the name in English as crepe myrtle, but the spelling crape myrtle generates a much larger number of hits on google.co.jp.)

Joseph 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell was determined to avenge the defeat that his American and Chinese forces had suffered during the withdrawal of 1942. His ostensible aim was to capture the aerodromes in far northern Burma, especially the one at Myitkyina .... There were two problems about this. The first was Stilwell's aggressive and misanthropic character and, in particular, his contempt for his allies; the second was that neither move was particularly strategically desirable.

Stilwell was professional soldier who had spent much time in China, but his long service had not instilled in him any great respect for the Chinese. As commander-in-chief of Chiang Kai Shek's nationalist armies he carried on a running war with Chiang's other commanders. His disagreements with Chiang over strategy soured relations between the two to the point where the continuation of Stilwell's command was constantly in question. In Stilwell's letters home, Chiang became 'Peanut', corrupt, obstinate and dominated by his wife, 'Madame', and later by his mistress, a nurse several decades his junior. Stilwell portrayed Chiang as hesitant and defensive, unwilling to commit his troops to an attack against the Japanese on the Burma front, afraid of both the Chinese communists and of his own generals. In fact, Chiang was a more astute general than might have appeared. He knew that the real danger to his government lay in a Japanese attack from the north against embattled Chungking. He did not want to send his best troops off to Myitkyina and was perfectly correct in his assessment of the communists, who were hoping to infiltrate into Nationalist China's territories from the north in the rear of any Japanese advance. Chiang refused to do anything much in Burma until the Allies agreed to put in an amphibious expedition on its southern coast. This again was sensible....

Stilwell's view of the British was scarcely better than his view of the Chinese. He regarded them as effete, defensive and disorganized. In a later visit to India he marked down [Viceroy] Wavell as a beaten man. The India of which the British were so proud was a pit of famished inefficiency, even more backward than China.... Mountbatten, who assumed the position of Supreme Commander Southeast Asia in the summer of 1943, was simply a 'glamour boy', a matinee idol with 'nice eye-lashes'. This was ironic since Stilwell's own reputation in America and outside was partly a media creation. He was the gritty American fighter struggling against Chink and Limey obstruction to take the war to the Japs, a poor man's General MacArthur. The disdain was mutual. Alan Brooke recorded: 'Except for the fact that he was a stout hearted fighter suitable to lead a brigade of Chinese scallywags, I could see no qualities in him.' He was an inept tactician and 'did a vast amount of harm by vitiating the relations between the Americans and British both in India and Burma'. The British high command were very dismissive of the Chinese, too. They suspected them, as Wavell had done in 1942, of having 'imperial' designs on north Burma.

The Estonian Baruto (the "Balt") won the Juryo division (like North American baseball's AAA league) with a perfect 15-0 record, the first rikishi to do so in over 40 years (since Kitanofuji).

Going into the final day, two Mongolians were tied for the lead in the Makuuchi division (the "majors"), with records of 13-1: yokozuna (grand champion) Asashoryu and sekiwake (junior champion) Hakuho. Moreover, Asashoryu's only loss was to Hakuho, who had also beaten him in the previous tournament, so they were not scheduled to face off again—unless both lost on the final day. And, sure enough, both did lose. Hakuho fell to veteran Kaio, who was once again on the verge of demotion unless he maintained a winning record (the win put him at 8-7), while Asashoryu fell to ozeki (champion) Tochiazuma, who had been bucking for promotion to yokozuna, but whose 12-3 record—without a tournament win—won't be good enough. So after all the regular bouts of the final day, Asashoryu and Hakuho had to come back and fight a deciding match, which Asashoryu had to struggle to win. So Asashoryu wins his 16th tournament, and Hakuho wins his 3rd outstanding performance award (and probably a promotion to ozeki).

25 March 2006

The other day, this Outlier took his in-laws down to Ueno station to pick up our 1-week JR rail passes and take a peek to see how the cherry blossoms were coming along at Ueno Park. The blossoms were just beginning to appear, and so were the snack and sake vendors.

One spot we lingered at was 不忍池 Shinobazu Ike, the name of which illustrates two troublesome aspects of Japanese attempts to write their own language using only Chinese characters.

The name of the pond is written in kanbun, a contorted method of rendering Japanese by means of Chinese syntax. The written Chinese characters, in order, translate as 'not hide pond', but the spoken Japanese, in morpheme order, translates as 'hideth-not pond'. (The verb 忍ぶ shinobu has a range of meanings and, frankly, I'm not sure which one was intended by the placenamers.) The -zu ending is just a more formal and archaic version of the negative-nai.Wikipedia explains the contortions of kanbun rather succinctly, wherein Chinese sentences are read as Japanese in a sort of simultaneous translation (saving the verb to the end, and so forth).

The term 池 ike for the body of water is sometimes translated 'lake'. As kids in Kyoto, we used to ride our bicycles up to a then rustic reservoir called Takaragaike 'Treasure Lake', now the site of a fancy international conference center. But the usual Japanese term for larger lakes is mizuumi, which is transparently composed of 水 mizu '(fresh)water' + 海 umi 'sea' but written with a single Chinese character, 湖 (pronounced hu in Chinese and ko in Sino-Japanese, as in Biwa-ko 'Lake Biwa'). A similar bit of Japanese morphology obscured by a single Chinese character is 雷 'thunder' (Chinese lei, Sino-Japanese rai), which probably could have been rendered as 神鳴り kami-nari 'god-sound'.

Though "koko" (C. jianghu), literally "rivers and lakes", is nearly a dead word in Japanese today, it was a fairly common expression in the mid-19th century. It is the keyword in the title of the column that reported stories of social and human interest in Tokyo nichinichi shinbun in 1872. It was part of the title of a popular book in 1873. And it appeared in the inaugural issue of the news nishikie in 1874.

In references to classical China and Zen, "koko" it is pronounced "goko". [With regard to] China, it refers to the world of the Yangzi river (Changjiang) and Dongting lake, and in certain Chinese folklore it alludes to the fighting spirit of outcasts who protect themselves with martial arts. As a Zen term, it signifies a place where monks and other practitioners gather from all quarters. If all roads lead to Rome, then the whole world is in Rome.

In the title of Koko shinbun, "koko" signifies the "world" or "society" one lives in -- much like "sanga" (mountains and rivers) is a somewhat nostalgic reference to one's country as a homeland. In this sense it is very close to its general usage in Chinese today to mean the wide (and sometimes an idealized) world.

23 March 2006

Andrei Lankov in The Korea Times profiles the early Japanese settlers in Korea.

Japanese newspapers and booklets made it clear that a move to Korea would be different from, say, migration to the United States (a very popular option in the Japan of the early 1900s). Those Japanese who moved to the United States could expect to find only low-level manual jobs. Those who chose Korea were to form the privileged colonial elite. As a book for prospective migrants frankly said: “In Korea one can carry on an independent enterprise with oneself as master, freely able to employ Koreans at low wages and tell them what to do”. A colonizer’s dream, indeed....

A majority of the Japanese migrants did not come from the privileged classes. For many a misfit adventures in a new colony looked like an attractive proposition. However, not all the newcomers were losers. In the 1900s and 1910s, Korea also was an attractive market for Japanese skilled labour. The Koreans provided cheap unskilled labour for a number of projects undertaken by the colonial administration, but they worked under supervision of the Japanese clerks and foremen. The number of Koreans who had modern technical skills was minimal, and the Japanese artisans and craftsmen enjoyed good wages. Around 1909, a shoemaker would earn on average 0.75 yen daily in Japan, but in Korea his average wage would be twice as high (about 1.4 yen) while the costs of living would be much less.

Most of those men were bachelors or moved to Korea without their families, so the country attracted a number of Japanese full and part-time prostitutes. In 1907 there were 4,253 women whose official occupation was politely described as ‘geishas’ or ‘waitresses’. Their arrival marked the introduction of the mass-oriented sex industry in Korea (for earlier Korean courtesans, known as kisaeng, did not perceive the sex-for-cash component as major part of their vocation ㅡ and their services, sexual or otherwise, were too expensive for the average commoner).

Face slapping became a major issue. In the following year, the Japanese command, rather than prohibiting it altogether, forbade anyone below the rank of lieutenant-colonel to behave in this way.

Japanese troops indulged in other offensive activities: they bathed naked by water hydrants on the streets, to the horror of Burmese women. In some cases they were surprisingly cavalier with Buddhist shrines, stripping them of wood for cooking fires and otherwise violating them. As he escaped overland to India, Thein Pe viewed the eating and living habits of the Japanese soldiers with disgust: 'we cannot say whether or not they knew what a bed pan was. They were seen eating rice from one', he reported. A later British compilation of anecdotes noted ponderously, 'The Japanese gastronomic habits had served them ill: that they ate dogs was observed to their discredit.' But Japanese soldiers were extremely popular with the Burmese young. The troops were genuinely fond of children. The 'had made much of Burman boys and girls, given them sweet meats, taught them baseball, played football with them and taught them Japanese songs.' It was to be a 'golden age for children'. Parents worried that their offspring were being alienated from them and that the Japanese were using their children to spy on them.

22 March 2006

By the middle of May [1942], with the monsoon beginning, the situation was desperate. Thousands had already died and the survivors were almost all diseased, starving and totally demoralized by the constant rain. The route through the Hukawng valley to Assam was the worse of the two remaining escape routes. It was a green hell of mud, human excrement and chaos snaking through the hills. The lower parts of the valley consisted of huge tracts of thirteen-foot-tall elephant grass or stretches of near impenetrable jungle, broken up by small paddies which quickly became lakes of mud. Higher up, the track became more precipitous and the jungle thicker. Near-starving people ate poisonous fruits from roadside shrubs or rotting food from tins. If they collapsed with diarrhoea, they were left behind to perish. Even healthy males could travel no more than eight miles a day in a sea of mud which stretched for mile after mile across the mountains. The only way to make progress was to slither along the roots of trees by the side of the track. Women and children collapsed and drowned in the mud. Cholera became epidemic as exhausted people sheltered in bivouacks to escape the rain and relieved themselves on the floors. Porters refused to touch the dead so they lay decomposing until medical staff arrived with kerosene to burn them. The butterflies in Assam that year were the most beautiful on record. They added to the sense of the macabre as they flitted amongst the corpses....

Some brave people helped others. Frank Sinclair Gomes, an Anglo-Indian telegraphist from Maymyo, three times rescued people from the river at Mogaung, on the southern edge of the valley, saving a Gurkha and a Madrasi woman and her child as their boats overturned. Two Gurkhas died as they tried to rescue starving people on the far side of another river by putting a rope across. All along the route hundreds of Kachins and Naga villagers helped, providing food and transport. They were the mostly unacknowledged heroes of the civilian evacuation, as they were to be the heroes of the later military resistance to the Japanese. Hundreds of thousands of refugees tramped through their lands, polluting their homes and bringing disease and death with them, but their traditions of hospitality were too strong to wither even in this crisis....

Pathetically weak in social services of all sorts, the Indian authorities had to fall back on one of the few efficient organizations in the subcontinent: the Assam Tea Planters Association. Alongside forest officers it was the planters who gave a semblance of order to the chaos....

These people, many of whom were Scots, seemed to come into their own in the crisis. 'Planters,' one wrote, 'are practical, early rising, hard-working people,' good at dealing with scholarly government officials as well as 'mobs of ignorant workers'. Many had fought in the First World War and were from factories and business, not from universities. They were particularly adept at handling 'men, materials, money and motor transport'. Despite their reputation, they had long since given up polo and fishing trips. The planters supplied their greatest resource, labour. As early as February 1942 the government asked the Tea Association for assistance on military projects in the northeast, 25,000 men for the Manipur road and 75,000 for the northerly road from Ledo into Burma. By March every small railway station had its contingent of tea-garden labourers ready to entrain. Each one was equipped with a hoe, two blankets, sufficient food for a fortnight and a hurricane lamp. They were sent off to build roads and carry supplies but many never returned, dying of cholera and exhaustion.

21 March 2006

塩盛り shiomori 'salt pile' - The other night, as we were leaving our favorite local fish restaurant in Ashikaga, my recently arrived Minnesota in-laws noticed what looked like a small pile of snow beside the door as we left. It turned out to be salt, and there was a matching salt pile on the other side of the entranceway, so I went back in and asked the very friendly and talkative sushi chef (who trained 3 years in San Francisco and 1 on Maui) what the story was. There were no customers at the sushi bar at that moment, so he came outside in the chilly wind and told us the story. The salt has two functions. The most commonly recognized one is to purify the premises by keeping evil spirits out. But the more interesting one is to attract customers in. The latter function apparently goes back to the days when goods traveled by oxcart. The idea was to tempt the oxen to stop and lick the salt, whereupon the traveler might also decide to stop for food or rest. The salt piles were called 塩盛り shiomori 'salt helpings', a term which is otherwise chiefly found in restaurant menus for assorted salty dishes.

義母 gibo 'mother-in-law' - Earlier that same evening, I had introduced my visiting in-laws to the waitress in that same fish restaurant. Both she and the sushi chef are always happy to assuage my curiosity about obscure readings (obscure to me, anyway), especially of fish names and sake brands. After I had introduced my mother-in-law as my 義理の母 giri no haha, she referred to her by a shorter version, 義母 gibo. So I asked her what the shorter version is for younger sister-in-law, 義理の妹 giri no imouto. In comprehensive kanji dictionaries, you can find 義妹 gimai, but she had never heard that term. The only such shorter term she had heard was 義兄 gikei 'elder brother-in-law'. The longer version is 義理の兄 giri no ani, and my New Nelson's kanji dictionary lists the full range for siblings-in-law: including the combining terms 義姉妹 gishimai 'elder and younger sisters-in-law' and 義兄弟 gikyoudai 'elder and younger brothers-in-law'. (The 義理 giri here is the same one used to mean 'duty, honor, debt of gratitude'; and the shorter prefix 義 gi is also used to indicate artificial human components, as in 義歯 gishi 'artificial tooth' or 義眼 gigan 'artificial eyeball'.)

紅き羹 akaki atsumono 'vermilion broth' - one of our two favorite coffee shops in Ashikaga is Café de Furukawa, an elegant place whose 12-page menu and guide to coffee history and brewing is titled 紅き羹 akaki atsumono, a purposely archaic and obscure phrase that I've translated 'vermilion broth'. Both elements tell a story. The reading aka for 紅 is archaic in Japanese, and the pronunciation akaki for akai 'red' is both archaic and regional, I believe. Nowadays, akai 'red' in Japanese is written 赤, while 紅 is normally read beni 'crimson, rouge, vermilion, lipstick', as in 紅生姜 beni shouga 'red pickled ginger', 紅染め benizome 'red-dyed cloth', or 紅鮭 benizake 'red salmon'. Chinese 紅 hong still means 'red' (and shows up in many given names of people born during China's Cultural Revolution). Its Japanese rendition kou- shows up in many compounds such as 紅茶 koucha 'red tea' (= 'black tea' in English), 紅海 Koukai 'Red Sea', and 紅灯 koutou 'red lantern, red light (district)'. The much rarer character 羹 atsumono 'hot soup, broth' (literally 'hot stuff') has a much shorter story. It shows up in a Japanese proverb that matches English "Once bitten, twice shy": 羹に懲りて膾を吹く Atsumono ni korite namasu o fuku 'Learning from hot broth, you blow on cold pickles'.

UPDATE: Thanks to Language Hat reader Matt for catching a grammar error in my rendition of the coffee-shop title. I originally wrote 紅きの羹 for what is actually 紅き羹. I've made the correction in the text above. Another Language Hat commenter turns up a different explanation for the doorway 塩盛り in a fun Youtube video guide to eating sushi.

19 March 2006

From the moment that the first bomb fell on Rangoon on 13 December 1941 there began an exodus from Burma of the Indian, Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Burmese population which was at the time the largest mass migration in history. By the autumn of 1942 in the region of 600,000 people had fled from Burma into India by land and sea. Of these as many as 80,000 may have perished of disease, exhaustion or malnutrition. These events have only paled into insignificance by comparison with the even greater horrors that were to be visited on South Asia over the next six years. They have been eclipsed by memories of the Bengal famine of 1943, by the riots, migrations and massacres that accompanied the partition of India in 1947 and by the Burmese civil war. Two conditions contributed to the scale of the disaster. First, the immigrant population of Burma was very large on the eve of the Japanese invasion because coolies, plantation workers and merchants were all anticipating the Burmese legislation which would restrict the number of new immigrants. People from all over India were desperate to get themselves and their families into Burma before the restrictive legislation was passed so that they would count as old rather than new immigrants. For so many families across India from the Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin, the few extra rupees earned by relatives working in the often appalling conditions of Burmese mines, factories and plantations made the difference between life and death.

The other condition was the vulnerability felt by the whole Indian population. When they fled from the cities, the Burmese could take shelter with relatives among the villages of the interior, or, if they were too far distant, in the hospices of the Buddhist monasteries. The civilian Chinese were on the whole a tightly organized and relatively egalitarian community of traders and skilled artisans. When the death knell of the British began to sound, many of them were systematically evacuated to Yunnan and China by their homeland associations, the regional and sectarian self-help organizations. Many undoubtedly perished in air raids and the nationalist soldiers had to endure appalling conditions, especially if they were wounded. Yet the Chinese devised an effective escape plan. Indians did not have this option. Shelter in India was far distant; with the collapse of industry and agriculture it was doubtful whether they could even find food, let alone a livelihood. They remembered the riots of 1930 and 1938 when large parts of the Burmese population turned on them with savage hostility. The British would not help them. More than one of the vaunted ma-baps, the 'mothers and fathers' of the people among the civil servants, had already precipitously fled in their motor cars ahead of the advancing Japanese. The only thing ordinary Indians could do, therefore, was to tie up their pathetic possessions in a bundle and get on the road or make for the ports where they might at least be able to squeeze on a boat as a deck-class passenger. For many, this decision was to prove fatal.

15 March 2006

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Burmese had built a reputation as one of the most militaristic of the peoples of southern Asia. They had sacked the Thai capital, caused grief to the Indian Mughals and had seen off the Chinese. In 1824, their great commander, Mahabandula, had sworn to bring the governor general of India back to Mandalay in silver fetters. Lord Amherst had not made that journey, however, and the Burmese had been sharply defeated in three major wars. The final one, in 1886, had seen the end of Burma's independence and its last monarch packed off into exile near Bombay. After 1886, the British did not recruit ethnic Burmese into their forces, as they had the Sikhs of the Punjab when they were conquered fiercely to resist British occupation for much longer than the Sikhs. Later, all sorts of pseudo-anthropological arguments were used about their unfitness. Burmese Buddhists, the British said, regarded soldiers as beings 'not very high on the human scale' because they took life. They, like the Bengalis, were supposedly 'effeminate' and could not take extremes of heat and cold.

This was all nonsense, as some British officials realized. A small company of Burmese sappers had done exceptionally well in the Mesopotamian campaign during the First World War where it had been 125 degrees in the shade. They also took the cold of the North West Frontier uncomplainingly. The basic reason that the British did not maintain the slightly increased percentage of Burmese recruits after 1918 was that Indians and recruits from the Burmese minorities were cheaper. All this meant that the vast majority of 'Burmese' in outfits such as the Burma Rifles and the Burma Frontier Force were Kachins, Shans, Karens like Smith Dun, or else locally resident Indians and Gurkhas. There were hardly a thousand ethnic Burmese officers or NCOs under arms in 1940. This stored up huge problems for the British in the Second World War. When the Japanese offered young Burmese military training, they leapt at the opportunity. It was a matter of pride as well as politics. How could the Burmese be a people if they did not have an army?

The lack of civil preparation, the general ‘Malaise’, was to be a persistent charge against the British in Malaya. But, by the outbreak of war, the people of Malaya had experienced more intrusive government than at any time in its history, especially in the form of food controls and price fixing. Mindful of Malaya's dependence on imported rice, the authorities had by 1940 built up reserves for 180 days. The state also took on new functions such as surveillance and propaganda. By April 1940 there were 312 officers involved in censorship in Singapore and 58 in Penang, plus a number of part-time workers, many of them European wives reading each other's mail.... However, the Ministry of Information in Singapore soon had a staff of over 100 and issued Chinese newspapers and illustrated propaganda in four languages at a rate of a million pieces a month. Before December 1941 the Japanese could not be mentioned. Instead was broadcast – in the style of Orson Welles's adaptation of War of the Worlds – a ‘nightmare’ of conquest by the fascists. The dire situation was disguised by over-confident propaganda which encouraged complacency about the scale of the threat. When the war began, the need to maintain this posture immobilized the British regime. The Japanese-owned daily the Singapore Herald fought against the mood by applauding Chinese cabaret girls for dancing with Japanese men and with such headlines as ‘Down with alarmism’ and ‘Prepare for peace’. In October, around 600 Japanese and their families were evacuated, and the consul-general was recalled at the end of the month. But many remained.

14 March 2006

In the libertarian magazine Reason,Financial Times columnist Tim Harford looks at disincentives for investing in economic infrastructure in Cameroon.

Many people have an optimistic view of politicians and civil servants—that they are all serving the people and doing their best to look after the interests of the country. Other people are more cynical, suggesting that many politicians are incompetent and often trade off the public interest against their own chances of re-election. The economist Mancur Olson proposed a working assumption that government’s motivations are darker still, and from it theorized that stable dictatorships should be worse for economic growth than democracies, but better than sheer instability.

Olson supposed that governments are simply bandits, people with the biggest guns who will turn up and take everything. That’s the starting point of his analysis—a starting point you will have no trouble accepting if you spend five minutes looking around you in Cameroon....

When [President Paul] Biya came to power in 1982, he inherited colonial-era roads that had yet to fall apart completely. If he had inherited a country without any infrastructure, it would have been in his interest to build it up to some extent. Because the infrastructure was already in place, Biya needed to calculate whether it was worth maintaining, or whether he could simply live off the legacy of Cameroon’s colonial rulers. In 1982 he probably thought the roads would last into the 1990s, which was as long as he could reasonably have expected to hold onto the reins of power. So he decided to live off the capital of the past and never bothered to invest in any type of infrastructure for his people. As long as there was enough to get him through his rule, why bother spending money that could otherwise go right into his personal retirement fund?...

Mancur Olson showed that kleptocracy at the top stunts the growth of poor countries. Having a thief for president doesn’t necessarily spell doom; the president might prefer to boost the economy and then take a slice of a bigger pie. But in general, looting will be widespread either because the dictator is not confident of his tenure or because he needs to allow others to steal in order to keep their support.

The rot starts with government, but it afflicts the entire society. There’s no point investing in a business because the government will not protect you against thieves. (So you might as well become a thief yourself.) There’s no point in paying your phone bill because no court can make you pay. (So there’s no point being a phone company.) There’s no point setting up an import business because the customs officers will be the ones to benefit. (So the customs office is underfunded and looks even harder for bribes.) There’s no point getting an education because jobs are not handed out on merit. (And in any case, you can’t borrow money for school fees because the bank can’t collect on the loan.)

It is not news that corruption and perverse incentives matter. But perhaps it is news that the problem of twisted rules and institutions explains not just a little bit of the gap between Cameroon and rich countries but almost all of the gap. Countries like Cameroon fall far below their potential even considering their poor infrastructure, low investment, and minimal education. Worse, the web of corruption foils every effort to improve the infrastructure, attract investment, and raise educational standards.

A new generation of Malay commoners was also finding a voice [during the 1930s]. An important source for this was the Sultan Idris Training College for Malay schoolteachers in Tanjong Malim, just north of Kuala Lumpur. The college was an unlikely site for innovation because it was founded to provide teachers for vernacular schools, the stated role of which was to educate Malays to become better fishermen and farmers. Yet the Malay staff of the college generated new enthusiasm for Malay literature and history, particularly the vanished golden age of the fifteenth-century empire of Melaka. They developed the Malay language in a new, standard Romanized script. The Japanese ally Ibrahim Yaacob was a graduate, and it was from amongst his costudents that many of the members of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda – the Union of Malay Youth – were drawn. To Ibrahim Yaacob, the rulers had left Malays like ‘a boat without a steersman’. His writings were a call to awareness of the Malay nation, the ‘Bangsa Melayu’, which was to take precedence over old loyalties. In this, the young had a special role. A Penang magazine called Saudara (‘Friend’) had created a revolutionary league of pen-friends modelled on the ‘Teddy Tail League’ of the Daily Mail. It allowed young Malays to address each other as strangers, as equals and across gender lines. Conservatives panicked that it would encourage girls to write love letters.

Language Hat notes a NY Times story about the efforts to reconstruct the dead Algonquian language spoken by Powhatan and Pocahontas in order to lend an air of authenticity to the dialogue in the movie The New World.

This family of Indian tongues, in one respect, reminded linguists of the Romance languages. Each was distinctive but as closely related as Spanish is to Italian or Italian to Romanian. Comparisons with related languages revealed the common elements of grammar and sentence structure and many similarities in vocabulary.

A translation of the Bible into the language once spoken by Massachusetts Indians offered more insights into the grammar. The Munsee Delaware version spoken by coastal Indians from Delaware to New York, including those who sold Manhattan, may be dead, but its grammar and vocabulary are fairly well known to scholars.

"We have a big fat dictionary of Munsee Delaware," said Dr. Rudes, who adapted some of those words when needed for Virginia Algonquian. Recordings of the last Munsee Delaware speakers, a century ago, were a valuable guide to pronunciations.

Another research tool was what is called Proto-Algonquian. It is the hypothetical ancestor common to all Algonquian speech, 4,000 words that scholars have compiled from the surviving tongues and documentation of the extinct ones.

The reconstruction involves educated guesses. Strachey set down words for walnut, shoes and two kinds of beast, "paukauns," "mawhcasuns," "aroughcoune" and "opposum." In Proto-Algonquian, similar words are paka-ni (meaning large nut), maxkesen (shoe), la-le-ckani (raccoon) and wa-pa'oemwi (white dog).

If India was the jewel in the imperial crown, Malaya was the industrial diamond. In 1940, the governor of Singapore estimated, Malaya was 'worth' an estimated £227.5 million to the British Empire. Its exports were £131.25 million, of which £93 million were to foreign countries, especially to the United States, to which it sold more than any other territory of the British Empire except Canada. From 1895 until the Japanese war, at no point did British Malaya need financial help from outside. Its status as a model colony was achieved from its own resources, and its accumulated budget surpluses saw it through the Great Depression. The key to the great public works and civic conceits of the Straits Settlements was opium. Duty on opium accounted for between 40 and 60 per cent of its annual revenue. Its production was monopolized by the government 'Chandu factory' on Pepys Road in Singapore which turned out 100 million tubes a year. Much of the revenue burden of Malaya therefore fel upon the Asian, particularly Chinese, labourers who were the greatest consumers of opium. The British crescent in Asia was supported by narco-colonialism on a colossal scale.

One of the most dramatic effects of the coming war was the way it forged the crescent into a bloodstained unity. First, the Japanese unified the peninsula from Singapore through Thailand to the borders of Assam by armed invasion. In response the British punched a land route from north India through the nearly impassable ranges of Assam and north Burma into the Irrawaddy valley. Reoccupying the Malay peninsula, they reclaimed their Southeast Asian patrimony. In fact, the designation 'Southeast Asia' was itself a brainchild of the military strategists who created Southeast Asia Command in 1943. Yet, as jazz-age imperialism drew to its end in 1939, there seemed little enough as yet, besides their rock solid belief in British superiority, to draw together the white settler societies of the crescent.

12 March 2006

Japanese goods were at the heart of the consumer boom in Malaya in the later 1930s. The closure of American markets in the Depression led Japanese manufacturers to focus their attention on the emerging markets to the south. In 1941, Japanese investments in British Malaya totalled 85 million yen. Japanese firms attempted to corner the market in goods from matchboxes to condensed milk; they imported over half of Malaya's everyday goods The people of Singapore marvelled at the new technology in a 'Japanese Commercial Museum'. Children in Malaya grew up with toys from the 'ten-cent' stalls on Middle Road in Singapore and elsewhere; the small army of Asian clerks depended on Japanese stores such as Echigoya for the cheap white shirts and ties they were required to wear in European offices. The Japanese were responsible for what was perhaps the most revolutionary innovation within the rural economy of Southeast Asia at this time: the bicycles with which country people could get their own goods to market. In the Blitzkrieg in Malaya in 1941, this technology would be used to devastating effect by General Yamashita's shock troops in a highly mobile form of warfare.

The Japanese had been a prominent feature of the urban landscape of Southeast Asia for many decades. Japanese ships routinely visited the ports; Japanese sailors drank in the bars and cafés, many of which catered especially to their needs. In the early period of Japanese southward enterprise, some of the earliest economic pioneers were the karayuki-san, the Japanese prostitutes. The rationale for this was, in the words of one pimp: 'Put a whorehouse anywhere in the wilds of the South Pacific and pretty soon you've got a general store to go there with it.' In the face of the 1915 boycott of Japanese businesses by the Chinese in Southeast Asia, it was largely the karayuki-san that kept Japanese commerce afloat.

HONOLULU – Recent archaeological study and analysis conducted by University of Hawai‘i at Manoa anthropology professor Terry Hunt suggests that the colonization of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) took place not between 400 and 800 A.D. as previously assumed by scientists, but at least 400 to 800 years later, closer to 1200 A.D.

The finding, which challenges current beliefs about the island’s prehistoric chronology and the dramatic environmental changes that occurred on the island, is detailed in an article by Hunt and co-author Carl Lipo of California State University, Long Beach, and scheduled for publication in the journal Science. It is previewed and available online now in Science Express.

As part of a UH archaeological field school on Rapa Nui, Hunt and a team of field researchers have been excavating archaeological deposits at Anakena, Rapa Nui’s only sand dune and the landing and settlement site of the island’s first inhabitants. Archaeological materials found here with superb preservation include artifacts, charcoal, faunal remains, and the distinctive tubular root molds of the giant Jubaea palm, now extinct....

A later settlement raises some interesting implications for Rapa Nui.

“Human impacts to the environment, such as deforestation, began almost immediately, at least within a century,” explains Hunt. “This means that there was no period where people lived in some ideal harmony with their environment; there was no early period of ecological sustainability. Instead, people arrived and their population grew rapidly, even as forest resources declined. The short chronology calls much of the traditional story into question.”

[My mother] and my father brought a curious blend of Jewish-European and African-American distrust and paranoia into our house. On his end, my father, Andrew McBride, a Baptist minister, had his doubts about the world accepting his mixed family. He always made sure his kids never got into trouble, was concerned about money, and trusted the providence of the Holy Father to do the rest. After he died and Mommy remarried, my stepfather, Hunter Jordan, seemed to pick up where my father left off, insistent on education and church. On her end, Mommy had no model for raising us other than the experience of her own Orthodox Jewish family, which despite the seeming flaws—an unbending nature, a stridency, a focus on money, a deep distrust of all outsiders, not to mention her father's tyranny—represented the best and the worst of the immigrant mentality: hard work, no nonsense, quest for excellence, distrust of authority figures, and a deep belief in God and education. My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.

SOURCE: The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride (Riverhead Books, 1996), pp. 28-29

Ka took some consolation in imagining that his poems might be translated into German and published in Akzent magazine, but it was still perfectly clear to him that should this article in the [eastern Anatolian] Border City Gazette prove to be the death of him, the published translations would mean nothing....

The many writers killed in recent years by Islamist bullets paraded before his eyes: first the old preacher-turned-atheist who had tried to point out "inconsistencies" in the Koran (they'd shot him from behind, in the head); behind him came the righteous columnist whose love of positivism had led him to refer in a number of columns to girls wearing head scarves as "cockroaches" (they'd strafed him and his chauffer one morning as he drove to work); then there was the investigative journalist who had tenaciously sought to uncover the links between the Turkish Islamist movement and Iran (when he turned on the ignition, he and his car went sailing into the sky). Even as he recalled these victims with tender sorrow, he knew they'd been naïve. As a rule the Istanbul press, like the Western press, had little interest in these fervent columnists and even less in journalists apt to get shot in the head for similar reasons on a backstreet of some remote Anatolian city. But Ka reserved his bile for a society that so easily forgot its writers and poets: For this reason he thought the smartest thing to do was retreat into a corner and try to find some happiness.

There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and bring progress to the nation; and the innocent ones, who get involved because they believe in equality and justice. The arrogant ones are obsessed with power; they presume to think for everyone; only bad can come of them. But the innocents? They feel so guilty about the suffering of the poor, and are so keen to share it, that they make their lives miserable on purpose.

09 March 2006

All over the world, men are three or four times more likely to kill themselves than women; it was a young civil servant in the National Office of Statistics in Ankara who had first noticed that in Batman [in eastern Turkey] the number of female cases was three times greater than the number for males and four times greater than the world average for females. But when a friend of his at the [secular] Republican published this analysis in "News in Brief," no one in Turkey took any notice. A number of correspondents for French and German newspapers, however, did pick up on the item, and only after they had gone to Batman and published stories in the European press did the Turkish press begin to take an interest....

A committee of suicide experts—including psychologists, police officers, judges, and officials from the Department of Religious Affairs—was already preparing to decamp from Batman to [nearby] Kars; as a preliminary measure the Department of Religious Affairs had plastered the city with its SUICIDE IS BLASPHEMY posters, and the governor's office was to distribute a pamphlet with the slogan as its title. Still, the deputy governor worried that these measures might produce the result opposite from the one intended—not just because girls hearing of others committing suicide might be inspired to do the same, but also because quite a few might do it out of exasperation with the constant lecturing from husbands, fathers, preachers, and the state.

"What is certain is that the girls were driven to suicide because they were extremely unhappy. We're not in any doubt about that," the deputy governor told Ka. "But if unhappiness were a genuine reason for suicide, half the women in Turkey would be killing themselves." He suggested that these women might be offended if they had to listen to a chorus of male voices remonstrating, "Don't commit suicide!" This, he told Ka proudly, was why he had written to Ankara asking that the antisuicide propaganda committee include at least one woman.

08 March 2006

The Military Police had no power to change or even protest the order for a purge of the Overseas Chinese, although they opposed it from the outset. At the Military Police Academy they had studied various national legal systems as well as international law and were, accordingly, more knowledgeable than staff officers in matters of trial and penalty. To the police it was difficult to believe that those glorious warriors, who had just gained a stupendous victory, those prominent staff officers who had received the highest military education, would talk and behave so erratically, at a time of busy operations and when Malaya was in an unsettled state immediately after the stupendous British surrender.

Without influence and lacking assertiveness, Lt. Onishi returned to his Headquarters and conveyed the liquidation order to the captain of his auxiliary Military Police. The cruel task would fall on his company of auxiliary police. Neither the auxiliary forces nor the military police were eager to massacre the Chinese. A company at that time consisted of around 60 soldiers equipped with rifles or light machine guns. They hauled the victims away in lorries and slaughtered them down by the beaches. One of his auxiliary Military Policemen, Yamaguchi, carried out the executions with the help of the others, near Changi Road. The number of victims is not known. The figure given by the Japanese was 6,000. The highest Chinese figure was 50,000.

A Chinese survivor:

Yap Yan Hong was one of those who went to Onishi's Jalan Besar checkpoint for screening. On the morning of the radio announcement, he put on a pair of new shoes and his best shirt. They were told to bring food and drink for three days. At the packed Jalan Besar Stadium he had a harrowing time, suffering from heat during the day, from exposure to cold at night, never knowing what to expect from one moment to the next. On the third day the women and children were told to go home. But the men were lined up and paraded before a high-ranking officer. As they passed him he flicked one index finger. If it was his left it meant the person must be detained; a flick of the right finger was a sign to go home. The fate of many thousands of people hung on the whim of a single person, on the wagging of a finger.

When asked by the military policeman at the third interrogation point where he had worked since the outbreak of war, young and naive Yap Yan Hong thought of the most innocent occupation. "In the map drawing business," he replied. This could be a spy, the policeman thought. So Yap was detained for two days. Then he was tied with a rope as part of a group of six and made to mount a truck with two other groups. They were taken past Changi prison to the end of the island. It was already evening when his group was made to wade into the sea and was shot by the Japanese auxiliary military police forces. Yap was lucky. When his rope made contact with the sea water, it loosened and Yap, miraculously, was able to swim away, and survived to tell his story.

An Indian Independence League member:

On the afternoon of 21 February, Mr. Royal Goho, leader of the Singapore branch of the Indian Independence League, visited Maj. Fujiwara Iwaichi, who at his liaison agency (the Fujiwara-kikan) was successfully recruiting Indians to join the Indian National Army.

"Major, do you know that the Japanese soldiers are indiscriminately detaining Overseas Chinese and massacring them? One can barely face such cruelty. Has the Japanese Army lost its mind? The British had already surrendered and the war was supposed to be over!"

Busy overseeing the surrender of the 55,000 Indian POWs, Fujiwara was unaware of the incident.

Goho pleaded:

The residents of Singapore and Malaya respected the Japanese soldiers' bravery and their fine policy to liberate and protect the natives. It is true that Indians and Malays were deeply hostile towards those Chinese who had been exploiting them to their hearts' content under the British. And it is true that some even rejoiced in the massacre of Overseas Chinese. However, upon witnessing horrifying scenes, their regard for the Japanese Army has turned into fear. This is a sad thing for the Japanese Army. Can't you do anything to stop it?

Fujiwara dispatched some members of his agency to investigate the situation. The result of the investigation was even worse than what Mr. Goho had recounted. Shocked by the seriousness of the matter, Fujiwara immediately went to see Chief-of-Staff Sugita at Army Headquarters, and inquired if this really was an order from the Army.

With a pensive expression, Sugita lamented that his moderate position had been overruled by staff officers holding extreme opinions, and an order to carry out the massacres had been issued much against his wishes. Fujiwara countered that the result of this purge was a disgrace for the Japanese Army ....

The commander decided to stay put for the night. It would give them time to bury the dead (after first severing their wrists to return hands to their homes). But digging in proved difficult, and after only 30 centimeters water appeared. So they did the opposite, they heaped earth to create a burial mound where they placed the corpses.

With two others, Tsuchikane was then ordered to ossify the wrists and hands by burning them to the bone. In an adjoining house, after sealing it and making sure no smoke escaped outside, they washed the pan from which they had just eaten their hot meal and put it on the stove. First they took commander Miyamoto's hand from the mess tin and began to grill it. "Shuu, shuu," it sizzled in the pan, with lots of grease escaping from the hand. Strong smoke with a hideous stench soon filled the room. It got unbearably hot and the three stripped to their loincloths as sweat cascaded down their bodies. One wrist took ages. Their chopsticks got shorter, catching fire many times owing to their efforts of turning the flesh and then burning away the muscle from the bones. The bones picked from the charcoal were transferred to a British tobacco can and passed on to the men waiting outside. They, in turn, put the bones in a white cloth and stored the packages with great care in their service bags.

The soldiers had promised each other to enter Singapore together, even if it were only their remains. They had fought together until today, they had eaten the same rice, they had ducked under the same bullets, and they felt bonds no different from those between brothers. Perhaps the bonds were even stronger through their knowledge of man's fleeting existence they had experienced each day over the past months.

Until recently, the city of Sano (佐野) in southern Tochigi prefecture was known throughout the region for its ramen. Its official tourist map is headlined Ramen Town (らーめんの郷) and says that the keywords for Sano City are "Eat, Look, Worship": くう みる おがむ. The back of the map lists the name, telephone number, regular day off, and hours of operation for 69 different ramen shops. The map itself also has textboxes listing 5 local tourist itineraries and 17 local festivals, each with its chief sponsor and annual schedule.

But Sano's reputation for ramen is now being outshone by its reputation for retail. The Sano Premium Outlets mall sits across National Route 50 (connecting Mito and Maebashi) on the southern edge of town. Old Route 50 runs right through the older part of town, parallel to the JR Ryomo line that used to serve the textile industries along the northern edge of the Kanto Plain. Now the major Tohoku Highway (connecting Tokyo and Sendai) also skirts the eastern edge of Sano. The mall lies at the juncture of these two major traffic arteries, one running north-south, the other east-west. All the long-distance buses make regular stops there.

The Outlier father and daughter recently paid a visit to Sano, arriving in time for lunch at Dai-chan Ramen, well-known enough locally that each of the three successive people we asked for directions were able to help us home in on it. It was a friendly, family-run place, whose daughter my wife had taught. The ramen was good, the portions were ample, and the weather was fairly mild, so we decided to walk the rest of the way to the outlet mall, along a busy, gassy highway lined with rather ghastly strip malls, whose highlight was a billboard advertising the nearby リストランテ ジアッポネゼ / Ristorante Giapponese, featuring Italian cuisine, not Japanese.

The Sano Premium Outlets map lists, not 69, but 159 shops, ranging from Adidas, Armani, and Billabong to Tommy Hilfinger, Victorinox, and Wedgwood. The lines were longest at Godiva and Cold Stone Creamery. The architecture is colonial America, with two tall, white steeples rising above red-brick walls, and the major thoroughfares linked by Boston, Cambridge, Lancaster, and Princeton Avenues. The shoppers were at least as interesting as the shops. Many were quite stylishly dressed, and there seemed to be an unusually high proportion of middle-aged dowagers with lapdogs and young parents with young kids. Among the first shoppers we encountered was a lady with two poodles, one of which walked around on its hind legs. I was tempted to ask her whether the poodle was also capable of a たち小便 ('standing piss'), but I didn't want to embarrass my daughter. I never embarrass my daughter! Well, at least not if I can help it--and I usually can't.

UPDATE: Ashikaga is locally famous for its soba, not its ramen, but some of the most elegant ramen I've had anywhere can be found at the Maruyama hand-made ramen restaurant about a block south and west of the Tobu Ashikaga-shi train station. Its leek and garlic ramen is to die for! Couldn't resist spooning up all the broth, either. Plus, it's open on Wednesdays, when most Ashikaga restaurants take the day off.

07 March 2006

In IIAS Newsletter 39, Pia Vogler profiles prison and settler society in early modern Hokkaido. Here's how it starts.

Hokkaido did not exist as a political entity before the Meiji period (1868-1912). Only the southernmost part of Ezo, as the Japanese called these northern territories, was politically incorporated into the Tokugawa state. Against the backdrop of modern nation-building and fear of a Russian invasion, the incorporation of Ezo into the Japanese state became a priority for the early Meiji authorities. In 1869 Ezo was renamed Hokkaido and the colonization of the island formally began. Recruitment of a labour force from mainland Japan was an indispensable precondition for the agricultural development of these vast and largely unsettled lands. Yet the initial recruitment of impoverished peasants and former samurai failed to meet politicians’ expectations; a larger work force was needed to accelerate colonization.

While peasantry and former aristocracy engaged in modest settlement activities in northern Japan, southern Japan experienced political unrest owing to local elites’ resistance to the new Meiji-government’s political authority. The 1877 Satsuma rebellion alone produced 43,000 political arrests that resulted in the sentencing of 27,000 individuals to imprisonment and forced labour. The existing system of town gaols was unprepared for such a large number of convicts. Inspired by Western reformist ideas on prisons and punishment, Meiji authorities ordered the establishment of Japan’s first modern prison in the northern prefecture of Miyagi. In 1879, a cluster of central prisons on Hokkaido was also suggested.

Hokkaido was seen as the perfect place for prisons, as prison labour could accelerate colonization. In addition, Hokkaido was far away from the political hot spot of Kyushu and therefore perceived as an ideal place for isolating ‘politically dangerous elements’ from mainland Japan. A third incentive was the hope that, once released, former inmates would stay in Hokkaido and contribute to an increase in the population. Five prisons were thus established on Hokkaido between 1881 and 1894. Kabato, Sorachi and Kushiro were the central prisons; Abashiri and Tokachi served as branch institutions. Each central prison held a particular inmate population: political convicts were mainly held in Kabato, felons were sent to Sorachi, and prisoners originating from the military and police went to Kushiro.

The Acorn has a mind-boggling post about the time-zone politics of South Asian nations.

Officially it was to save daylight. But the standardisation of time is just another way in which the countries of the subcontinent seek to assert their distinct national identity. Start with India, which in a style befitting the character of its polity, centralises its reference meridien by splitting the differences, ending up five and a half-hours ahead of UTC....

But it is Nepal that wins the prize for asserting a distinct national identity. It is five hours and forty-five minutes ahead of UTC, or 15 minutes ahead of Indian Standard Time.

The President’s office informed the public today that the clocks in Sri Lanka would revert back to the old time i.e. Indian standard time from April 14, 2006 onwards. April 14 is the traditional Tamil/Sinhalese New Year (known in India as Baisakhi), a major public holiday in the island.

The shift back to old time is intended to accommodate the political powerful Buddhist monks and astrologers who never accepted day light savings time in 1996. Parents had also complained that school children had to leave for school when it was still dark. The decision in Colombo also puts the clocks in the island in line with the LTTE which never adopted the original time change in its territory.

06 March 2006

Lee Seung-yeop hit a go-ahead, two-run homer in the eighth inning of a game that mattered little because both nations were assured of advancement....

Dae-Sung Koo, whose contract was sold last week by New York Mets to a South Korean club, pitched two scoreless innings of relief to get the victory as the South Koreans overcame a two-run deficit.

Chan Ho Park of the San Diego Padres pitched the ninth for the save. After he retired Suzuki for the final out, South Korean players ran on to the field and mobbed the pitcher.

South Korea (3-0) and Japan (2-1) will travel to Arizona for exhibition games against major league teams, then go to Anaheim, Calif., for the second round, to be played from March 12-16. Their second-round opponents will include the top two teams from Group B, which has the United States, Canada, Mexico and South Africa.

Lee, who holds the Asian record of 56 homers in a season, signed with the Yomiuri Giants in the offseason after spending the last two seasons with the Pacific League's Chiba Lotte Marines. The game was played before a crowd of 40,353 in the Tokyo Dome, his new home ballpark.

via Lost Nomad, one of whose commenters adds more on the rivalry between Lee and Suzuki (Ichiro):

As a side note, the Korean 1st baseman who hit the game winning home run against Japan, sought a tryout with the Seattle Mariners in 2003. I believe this was the season after he set the Asian [home run] record. Keep in mind back then, the Mariners had 3 Japanese players and the majority ownership was the CEO of Nintendo. The Mariners never offered him the tryout.

He then went to Japan and signed with Lotte [managed by Bobby Valentine]; this past year Lotte winning the Japan's version of the world series and having team high in [home runs]. How ironic.

I was researching a photo exhibit on the history of modern Korean architecture to be held at the Ilmin Museum of Art through April 16 when I came across a rather astonishing photograph of an intact Shinto shrine in Pohang. Having assumed, wrongly it would seem, that all of Korea’s Shinto shrines had been promptly destroyed upon Liberation, I was rather surprised to see some lived on, albeit in functions quite different from those for which they were intended.

As of June 1945, the Japanese had built over 1,000 Shinto shrines in Korea, including 77 jinja and two imperial jingu, including the massive Chosen-jingu, which the Japanese Government-General kindly plopped on the slopes of Namsan [in the middle of Seoul].

05 March 2006

[Japanese businessman] Omori and his 500 fellow prisoners reached India, after a ten-day voyage. They berthed at Calcutta, and stayed there for three days. At Changi Prison [in Singapore] they had been divided into two batches, and half of the original group from Port Swettenham had not appeared. Nor had they seen their wives and daughters.

After a 70-hour ride, they were unloaded in the middle of nowhere and marched two hours with their bags to the bulwark of an old fort. They filed through a huge entrance on which was written "Pranakila". Inside, in a large patch of lawn, tents were lined up in rows to which they were assigned, six persons to one tent. One week later their missing families arrived, around 500 women and children, whom British authorities had held in separate camps on Blakang Mati (now renamed Sentosa) and other islands off Singapore.

Life at Pranakila camp near New Delhi, on an Indian diet of curries, lots of beans and gallons of tea, was not uncomfortable. The women had their own quarters with partitions in between and their beds were lined up under the thick stone ramp which acted as insulation against heat and coldness. The men were treated according to the standards of Indian soldiers; they slept in hammocks, and when it got cold they were given hay in addition to a blanket. Slowly their numbers grew to around 3,000 as they awaited the day when they would return home.

The grand Army Building on Changchun's wide main street reflected the majestic appearance of the Japanese military, and the newly-completed Building of Justice displayed a degree of splendour unsurpassed even in their homeland. The area around the station resembled bustling Japanese streets, and the adjoining pleasure district of Yoshino was better even than similar areas at home. Department stores flourished and in the colourful streets one could find eating and drinking stalls and all sorts of entertainment. There was no better place to relax from the boredom of camp life and amuse themselves on a leisurely Sunday afternoon.

Nowhere outside Japan could one feel more proud of being a Japanese. In these grand buildings, power and prestige paired with a never-ending energy in the buoyant shopping streets full of Japanese. But as soon as one set foot in the squalid suburbs of the Manchurians, the poverty was appalling. Japan's puppet state, Manchukuo, was still a long way from realising the North Asian slogan: "Harmony among the five families [Japan, China, Manchukuo, Taiwan, and Korea], the Kingly Way is paradise."

04 March 2006

"The question is this: Speaking as the Communist modernizing secularist democratic patriot I now am, what should I put first, the enlightenment or the will of the people? If I believe first and foremost in the European enlightenment, I am obliged to see the Islamists as my enemies and support this military coup. If, however, my first commitment is to the will of the people—if, in other words, I've become an unadulterated democrat—I have no choice but to go ahead and sign that statement [condemning the coup]. Which of the things I've said is true?"

"Take the side of the oppressed and go sign that statement," said Ka.

"It's not enough to be oppressed, you must also be in the right. Most oppressed people are in the wrong to an almost ridiculous degree. What shall I believe in?"

"Ka doesn't believe in anything," said Ipek.

"Everyone believes in something," said Turgut Bey. "Please, tell me what you think."

Ka did his best to convince Turgut Bey that if he signed the statement he would be doing his bit to help Kars move toward democracy. Sensing a strong possibility that Ipek might not want to go to Frankfurt with him, he started to worry that he might fail to convince Turgut Bey to leave the hotel [to go sign the statement]. To express beliefs without conviction was liberating. As he nattered on about the statement, about issues of democracy, human rights, and many other things that were news to none of them, he saw a light shining in Ipek's eyes that told him she didn't believe a thing he was saying. But it wasn't a shaming, moralistic light he saw; quite the contrary, it was a gleam of sexual provocation. Her eyes said, I know you're spouting all these lies because you want me.

So it was that, just minutes after discovering the importance of melodramatic sensibilities, Ka decided he'd discovered a second great truth that had eluded him all his life: There are women who can't resist a man who believes in nothing but love. Overcome with excitement at this new discovery, he launched into a further monologue about human rights, freedom of thought, democracy, and related subjects. And as he mouthed the wild simplifications of so many well-intentioned but shameless and slightly addled Western intellectuals and the platitudes repeated verbatim by their Turkish imitators, he thrilled to the knowledge that he might soon be making love to Ipek [once her father was away signing the statement] and all the while stared straight into her eyes to see the reflection of his own excitement.

03 March 2006

They headed north to ... the poorest neighborhoods. The houses were shanties made of stone, brick, and corrugated aluminum siding. With the snow continuing to fall, they made their way from house to house: Serdar Bey would knock on a door, and if a woman answered he would ask to see the man of the house, and if Serdar Bey recognized him he would say in a voice inspiring confidence that his friend, a famous journalist, had come to Kars all the way from Istanbul to report on the elections and also to find out more about the city—to write, for example, about why so many women were committing suicide—and if these citizens could share their concerns, they would be doing a good thing for Kars. A few were very friendly, perhaps because they thought Ka and Serdar Bey might be candidates bearing tins of sunflower oil, boxes of soaps, or parcels full of cookies and pasta. If they decided to invite the two men in out of curiosity or simple hospitality, the next thing they did was to tell Ka not to be afraid of the dogs. Some opened their doors fearfully, assuming, after so many years of police intimidation, that this was yet another search, and even once they had realized that these men were not from the state, they would remain shrouded in silence. As for the families of the girls who had committed suicide (in a short time, Ka had heard about six incidents), they each insisted that their daughters had given them no cause for alarm, leaving them all shocked and grieved by what had happened.

They sat on old divans and crooked chairs in tiny icy rooms with earthen floors covered by machine-made carpets, and every time they moved from one house to the next, the number of dwellings seemed to have multiplied. Each time they went outside they had to make their way past children kicking broken plastic cars, one-armed dolls, or empty bottles and boxes of tea and medicine back and forth across the way. As they sat next to stoves that gave out no heat unless stirred continuously, and electric heaters that ran off illegal power lines, and silent television sets that no one ever turned off, they heard about the never-ending woes of Kars.

I'm now back in Ashikaga, Japan. After a long flight, I cleared customs at Narita in time to get the 15:15 long-distance bus direct to Ashikaga (for only ¥4300!), arriving by 18:00 after only one stop at the Sano Premium Outlet Mall. The traffic was slowest on the dogleg through northeastern Tokyo (past Disneyland), but nearly as bad on strip-mall-lined National Route 50 between Sano and Ashikaga at rush hour. My wife and I celebrated by going out to eat at our favorite local fish (and fine sake) restaurant: うおえ (魚恵)—although I had buta kakuni 'braised pork belly' as insurance against the cold in our underheated apartment. We were the only customers at the counter (February is their slowest month) and got to chat with the sushi chef, who learned his trade in San Francisco and Maui.

In the airport waiting for departure I started reading Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow, one of the best I've read in a long, long time. During one passage of highly charged conversation that I was reading today, I suddenly recalled my similarly intense engagement with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain during the first month or so of my time studying Romanian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. Here's one short summary of Mann's opus:

A young bourgeois man visits his cousin in a mountain sanitarium where he 'falls ill' and struggles with the opposing forces of rationalism, faith, aestheticism, and common sense embodied by the other patients before rushing into World War I. The novel depicts the various cultural and intellectual currents swirling around in the soul of pre-World War I Europe.

And here's how Publisher's Weekly summarizes Snow:

A Turkish poet who spent 12 years as a political exile in Germany witnesses firsthand the clash between radical Islam and Western ideals in this enigmatically beautiful novel. Ka's reasons for visiting the small Turkish town of Kars are twofold: curiosity about the rash of suicides by young girls in the town and a hope to reconnect with "the beautiful Ipek," whom he knew as a youth. But Kars is a tangle of poverty-stricken families, Kurdish separatists, political Islamists (including Ipek's spirited sister Kadife) and Ka finds himself making compromises with all in a desperate play for his own happiness. Ka encounters government officials, idealistic students, leftist theater groups and the charismatic and perhaps terroristic Blue while trying to convince Ipek to return to Germany with him; each conversation pits warring ideologies against each other and against Ka's own weary melancholy. Pamuk himself becomes an important character, as he describes his attempts to piece together "what really happened" in the few days his friend Ka spent in Kars, during which snow cuts off the town from the rest of the world and a bloody coup from an unexpected source hurtles toward a startling climax. Pamuk's sometimes exhaustive conversations and descriptions create a stark picture of a too-little-known part of the world, where politics, religion and even happiness can seem alternately all-consuming and irrelevant. A detached tone and some dogmatic abstractions make for tough reading, but Ka's rediscovery of God and poetry in a desolate place makes the novel's sadness profound and moving.

Sure enough, in an author interview posted by Random House, Pamuk mentions Mann as one of his major influences.

AAK: Who are some of the writers and artists who have influenced you?

OP: I am forty-eight, and at this age the idea of influence makes me nervous. I’d rather say that I learn and pick-up things from other authors. I’ve learned from Thomas Mann that the key to pleasures of historical fiction is the secret ar[t] of combining details. Italo Calvino taught me that inventiveness is as important as history itself. From Eco, I’ve learned that the form of the murder mystery can be gracefully used. But I have learned most from Marguerite Yoursenar; she wrote a brilliant essay about the tone and language in historical fiction.